by Susan Butler
What do the Japanese think of being made the villains of the piece? In 1981 the Japanese writer Fukiko Aoki, who would three years later become bureau chief for the Japanese edition of Newsweek, decided to find out what really happened and if possible lay the Japanese demons to rest. The result of her investigation was first published in an article that appeared in the April 1983 issue of the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju, titled, “Was Amelia Earhart Executed?” In 1984 she published a book, Searching for Amelia. Her work is not known in this country because neither the article nor the book has been translated.
Her judgment, based on the evidence she found, should (hope springs eternal) lay to rest all of the “captured by the Japanese” stories in the English-speaking world. Her conclusion, based on hard evidence and exhaustive research over the years, is the same as that of most knowledgeable contemporary fliers: that Amelia and Fred’s plane must have sunk to the bottom of the sea.
Aoki found that there were indeed only two Japanese ships in the area on July 2, 1937, the battleship Koshu and the carrier Kamoi, as the Japanese said, and she thoroughly investigated the movements of both ships. She interviewed Kozu Yukinao, who had been communications officer of the Koshu, and saw copies of the Koshu’s log for the days concerned. The Koshu left the island of Palau in the Carolines on June 26 and arrived at Grinich, the southernmost of the Japanese Mandated Islands, on July 3, the day after the Electra went down. The men aboard the ship were watching for the plane, so it was no surprise to them when they received orders to search for it a few days after it was reported missing. The Koshu headed south, out of Japanese and into United States waters, fully aware of where they were. But Japanese superiors, uncomfortable at the idea that they were trespassing, as it were, ordered the ship back north. The Koshu arrived at Jaluit Island in the Marshalls on July 13, having seen nothing, stayed at Jaluit till the nineteenth and then went back to Truk and Saipan.
The second Japanese ship, the Kamoi, was docked in Saipan but did not join in the search. According to Yuichi Wada, a sailor on the Kamoi whom Aoki interviewed, the Kamoi left Saipan on July 3 and headed straight for Japan without joining in the search. Aoki saw copies of the Kamoi’s newspapers for the days concerned that corroborate these facts.
This is important because all the various Westerners who maintain Amelia and Fred were captured by the Japanese, killed, and/or tortured have one of these two ships picking them up at various places and transporting them to an island—usually Saipan in the Marianas—because there was no other means of transportation.
Aoki tracked down every person still alive in Saipan whom Fred Goerner and others said had seen Amelia and Fred in the hands of the Japanese. There was Josepa Reyes Sablan, quoted as seeing two white people taken into the military police headquarters in Garapan. She told Aoki she remembered only having her picture taken with an American, “but says she doesn’t know anything about whether it was a white pilot or not.” Josephine Blanco, cited extensively, wasn’t believed by her brother-in-law He told Aoki, “she was really young at the time.” No Japanese inhabitant of Saipan—and there were 20,000 according to Aoki—ever saw or thought they saw Amelia. Said one islander Aoki questioned, “About once a year a foreigner comes here to ask us that same question They always have this expression like we are hiding something here. Unfortunately we aren’t.”
Aoki’s conclusion, after “exhaustive research,” was that Fred Goerner had gone around the island suggesting a possible scenario, and the islanders, happily, suddenly important, at the front and center of the world and wanting to stay that way, agreed with their newfound friend and made up stories that they thought would please him.
But her main point is that at this stage there would have been no point in interning Amelia and Fred, because no matter where they landed, there would have been nothing of a military nature for them to see. A bit later would have been a different story, but in July 1937 Japanese eyes were still focused on Manchuria, which they invaded five days after Amelia’s plane went down. They had indeed begun to build airfields on their islands, but none on the order that the U.S. Navy thought, and they had as yet built no fortifications. It was still peacetime, and there weren’t yet even soldiers on the island, let alone a military prison. Japanese construction on their islands was roughly the equivalent of the American government improvements on Howland, Baker, and Jarvis, combined with Pan Am’s island docking facilities. Like the combination Bureau of Air Commerce/ Department of the Interior colonization effort with airfield funds supplied by the WPA, the Japanese had civilians building airfields, and by 1937 they had four: on Saipan, Palau, Yap, and Truk. The Kamoi’s mission in July 1937 was to drop off two engineers to design and build more airstrips in the Mandated Islands.
The most notable fact about the Japanese navy in that part of the South Pacific in June and July 1937 according to Aoki, was its absence. The Koshu was a slow, refitted German cargo ship. Yet this was the ship that Japan was relying on to gather information on ocean currents and prevailing weather patterns and at the same time to patrol their waters.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 8, 1941, four Japanese Mitsubishi planes attacked Howland and Baker. Two of the four Hawaiian boys on Howland were killed, and two others managed to hide in a thicket and were taken off the island by navy destroyers. A short while later Japanese submarines surfaced off the islands and shelled them flat, destroying everything including the lighthouses. The Japanese did it because they thought there were underground storage tanks as well as other crucial equipment on the islands. They thought America was hiding something.
Things would change shortly for both countries—six months would make a huge difference. Japan would step up its activities in the South Pacific, as would the United States. In February 1938 Black received orders to set up permanent American stations on two more islands, Canton, four miles wide by eight miles long, and Enderbury, both in the Phoenix group, to the south of Howland and Baker, which he did even though the British flag flew over Canton. Black landed, met the British, announced his intentions, and carried out his orders, which were to “raise our flag on a pole a little taller than theirs and to fly a little larger flag and build our foundations a little more solidly than theirs, all of which we did.” He left colonists—more young Hawaiians—behind.
Canton, only 421 miles to the southeast of Howland, as well situated to be a mid-Pacific refueling station as Howland and so much bigger, was within a few years transformed into an air force base. During the war, it would figure as the destination for a B-17 bomber that went down somewhere in the Pacific with Captain Eddie Rickenbacker aboard. Rickenbacker was on a mission to deliver a secret message from the secretary of war to General Douglas MacArthur, then in Port Moresby, New Guinea. Rickenbacker and an air force crew of five left Honolulu bound for Canton Island, eighteen hundred miles distant. Those aboard the plane never figured out exactly how they went wrong, but they never found Canton—or any other island. As the time for their arrival approached and passed, Canton fired off their antiaircraft guns with shells timed to go off at seven thousand feet, and sent up search planes; the Canton radio wasn’t working but the fliers were in radio contact with nearby Palmyra Island. After many hours the B-17 ran out of gas and landed in the sea. They managed to get out and into rubber rafts, floated unseen for 22 days, and were finally sighted and rescued. They were luckier than Amelia and Fred.
There will always be speculation about Amelia Earhart’s death. It is hard—heartbreaking—to lose a major icon so abruptly, so inconclusively, and it is so tempting to try to write another ending to the grand adventure.
Jake Coolidge, the photographer who made her “Lady Lindy,” said, “She was great; Amelia made herself. She got a break handed to her sure. The Friendship was one of those things that can happen to a person. But what she did with the break was her.”
So this pilot, this woman who, when asked if she missed social work, replied that she had never left it, ended up sufferin
g the same fate as other pilots who died making epic flights: Charles Nungesser and François Coli attempting the North Atlantic in their legendary plane L’Oiseau Blanc in 1927; Frances Grayson attempting the North Atlantic in 1927; Princess Anne Lowenstein-Wertheim attempting the North Atlantic also in 1927; Elsie Mackay and Walter Hinchcliffe attempting the North Atlantic in 1928; Charles Ulm, whose hand Amelia shook just before he took off, attempting the Pacific in 1935; Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and his navigator Thomas Pethybridge somewhere over the Bay of Bengal in 1935; Wiley Post and Will Rogers, near Barrow, Alaska in 1935; Jean Mermoz who once said, “It’s worth it, it’s worth the final smash-up,” attempting the South Pacific in 1936.
Amelia came into the public eye because she was an adventurer, but she was more: she was America’s sweetheart, America’s shield. She beckoned us on, and set more records, and she did it seemingly effortlessly. She made us so proud to be American. Perhaps because she was cut down in her prime—perhaps because she did not quite have time to fulfill her potential, we can’t let her go. She is thirty-nine forever. She has become America’s dream woman.
She is if anything more revered now than she was immediately after her death. The Boston-based Women’s Educational and Industrial Union annually gives an Amelia Earhart award to a prominent Boston woman for expanding the economic and career opportunities for other women. Logan Airport has an Amelia Earhart terminal. Atchison, Kansas, has made her birthplace and childhood home into a museum; their airfield is named after her. Most of the places she lived have named streets after her.
The Zonta International Foundation awarded 35 women $6000 each for graduate study in aerospace-related science and aerospace-related engineering in 1997. They will join the 522 women from 51 countries who have already received Amelia Earhart Fellowship awards. The Ninety-Nines now number over 6,500 women. Every year they give out Amelia Earhart awards to women for advanced flight training: over 300 since inception. Beginning in 1992 corporate America has been contributing funds to the program.
Two women have made commemorative flights retracing Amelia’s route in Lockheed Electras: Ann Pellegreno in 1967 on the thirtieth anniversary of Amelia’s flight, and Linda Finch thirty years later on the 100th anniversary of Amelia’s birth. The Vega in which Amelia flew the North Atlantic hangs in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Now novels as well as biographies are written about her.
Amelia wrote an epitaph for her friend Wiley Post:
So close was he to his profession that he could not know the sheen on his own wings.
It could well serve as hers.
Notes
Abbreviations Used in Notes
AE Amelia Earhart
AOE Amy Otis Earhart
GPP George Palmer Putnam
JM Janet Mabie
KCP Kathryn (Katch) Challiss Pollock
LC Lucy Van Hoesen Challiss
MEM Muriel Earhart Morrissey
AG Atchison Globe
BET Boston Evening Transcript
BG Boston Globe
CITP Courage Is the Price
ET Evening Telegram
FOI The Fun of It
LF Last Flight
LITHW Lady in The High Wind
NYHT New York Herald Tribune
NYT New York Times
PA Popular Aviation magazine
SW Soaring Wings
WM Wide Margins
20H 20 Hrs. 40 Min.
Columbia OH Columbia University Oral History Collection
DH Denison House
FDRL Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
IWASML International Women’s Air and Space Museum Library
NASM National Air and Space Museum
NYPL New York Public Library
SLRC Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College
WEIU Women’s Educational and Industrial Union
Preface
page xiv: “I advise them all ...”: The Purdue Alumnus, December 1975.
Colonial History
page 3: “in the midst of a heat wave ...”: AG, July 24, 1897.
page 3: dubbed the “Queen”: Ruth Martin, Family Tree: Challiss, Harres, Martin, Tonsing, Otis, account of W L. Challiss.
page 4: half a block away ...: Robert L. Tonsing, letter to author.
page 4: “The sky turned ...”: JM, LITHW, SLRC.
page 4: At eleven thirty P.M....: AOE, baby book, SLRC.
page 5: When the Episcopal minister ...: Records of Trinity Episcopal Church in Atchison.
page 5: “I baptize thee ...”: Book of Common Prayer of 1892, in use in Atchison in 1897, according to the Rector Max T. Tracy, in letter to author.
page 5: This baby was the first ...: Martin, Family Tree.
page 5: in the way she entered ...: AOE, baby book, SLRC.
page 6: “But Saturday’s bairn ...”: Ibid.
page 6: Maria Grace Harres was born ...: Martin, Family Tree.
page 6: “He thought Grandmother ...”: Ibid.
page 7: “The religious severity ...”: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, p. 275.
page 7: large three-story house ...: Martin, Family Tree.
page 7: “a natural born nurse”: Reminiscences of AOE in Martin, Family Tree, p. 4.
page 7: “delicacy and good taste”: Trollope, Domestic Manners, p. 261. Mark Twain said of Trollope that she, “alone of them all, dealt what the gamblers call a strictly ‘square game.’ She did not gild us; and neither did she whitewash us,” Alfred Knopf edition of Trollope, frontispiece.
page 8: Alfred’s forebears, ...: Otis Family in America, New England Historic Genealogical Society.
page 8: “taxation without ...”: Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 131.
page 9: “As to my course ...”: Alfred Otis, letter to George Otis, March 6, 1852, given to author by Nancy Balis Morse.
page 9: “Come on then, gentlemen ...”: Seward quoted in David McCullough, Truman, p. 27.
page 10: on the September day ...: Frank Blackman, Kansas: A Cyclopedia of Kansas History, vol. 1, p. 109.
page 10: “to kill a baby ... : Leverett Spring, Kansas: The Prelude to the War for the Union, p. 124.
page 10: “but for the hotbed plants ...”: Ibid., p. 33.
page 10: “From these facts ...”: Eli Thayer, A History of the Kansas Crusade, p. 57.
page 10: his “ideal” settlers: .... Ibid., p. 179.
page 11: We cross the prairies as of old ...: Whittier quoted in Ibid., p. 69.
page 11: southern mob tarred and feathered ...: Spring, Kansas: The Prelude, p. 82.
page 12: Even David Rice Atchison ...: Blackman, Cyclopedia of Kansas History, vol. 1, p. 113.
page 12: “The grand jury indicted ...”: Alfred Otis, letter to George Otis, Nov. 16, 1856, given to author by Nancy Balis Morse.
page 12: “His capital stock was ...”: Genealogical and Biographical Record of NorthEastern Kansas, Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1900, p. 38.
page 12: a photograph of Amelia Otis ...: Martin, Family Tree, p. 83.
page 13: Cold and remote ...: Pat Antich, interview with author. Alfred’s physical description, given by Janet Mabie, came from either Amy or Amelia.
page 13: The part of going to church ...: Alfred, letter to George, Oct. 21, 1953. The sect was the Campbellites.
page 13: “It presents a very fine ...”: Burton Williams, Senator John James Ingalls, p. 25.
page 14: from gunpowder to coal oil ...: Advertisement, Freedom’s Champion, NYPL, April 1862.
page 14: “In winter time ...”: White, Story of a Kansas Parish, p. 9.
page 14: Atchison passed a law ...: Freedom’s Champion, NYPL, July 8, 1862.
page 14: the last thirty southern families ...: Mrs. W L. Challiss, The Story of the First Baptist Church of Atchison, Kansas, pp. 9-11.
page 15: The early records ...: White, Story of a Kansas Parish, pp. 9-11.
page 15: “Glorious vietory ... : Freedom’s Champion,
NYPL, July 18, 1863.
page 15: A short while later ...: Martin, Family Tree.
page 15: his custom to return ...: Biographical and Genealogical Records of NorthEastern Kansas, p. 41.
page 16: One of the first ofAtchison’s ...: Challiss, Story of the First Baptist Church.
page 16: “When we first came .. :”: Flo Menninger, Days of My Life, p. 186.
page 17: Mark Twain wrote ...: E.W Howe, Plain People, p. 146.
page 18: “were the undisputed leaders ...”: MEM, CITP, p. 20.
page 18: “Among the best stories ...”: AE, FOI, p. 4.
page 18: diphtheria epidemic ...: MEM, CITP, p. 19.
page 19: persuaded her parents ...: JM, LITHW, II, p. 21, SLRC.
page 19: “Mymotherhadwanted...”: Nancy Balis Morse, interview with author,
page 19: Amy embroidered ...: Martin, Family Tree; Philadelphia city directories for those years.
page 19: She even fibbed about ...: Morse interview.
page 20: Amy’s denial mirrors ...: KCP, interview with author. Alfred and Amelia always claimed that Amy’s youngest brother, who was obviously slow, had been injured at birth. Yet it was clearly understood within the family, even by the cousins, that Theodore was retarded.
page 20: The ball, “the way she told it,” ...: MEM, CITP, p. 23.
page 20: He said: “This is Edwin ...”: Ibid.
page 20: Johann Earhardt, ...: Sue Nunes, Tree Top Baby, p. 208. Material is from Pennsylvania Archives.
page 21: The chronicle of his descendants ...: David Earhart, A Brief History of the Ancestors and Near Kindred of the Author, unpublished ms., Jan. 1, 1898; SLRC.
page 22: Taking note of his proselytizing nature, ...: Lillian Hickman, The History of Midland College, unpublished thesis, Luther Library.
page 22: He picked a disastrous year.: Earhart, Brief History.
